Renovating a house, a garden and other things

Garden design: the ‘bit-of-string-and-scrap-of-paper’ way

June 13, 2010

The 8 week old addition to our family is rather impatient when it comes to spending hours on site, so our progress on the garden has been slow-growing. I’ll offer up the little progress we have made, if only to remind myself how much further we have to go…

We’ve decided we’d like to try and achieve the following garden goals:

An eating area (for the 5 days a year it’s nearly warm enough to eat outside)

A handkerchief-sized area where we can grow a few vegetables (ok, so we’ll save about 3 bags of supermarket salad a year, but it’s a start)

A lovely ‘green’ view from the large, glass kitchen doors

Planting that provides interesting colours and textures throughout the year

A minimalist colour palette

Plenty of interesting foliage – lots of different greens and plant structures

With that in mind, and absolutely nothing else of any help, we scribbled out a plan of what we think we’d like the garden to look like. Here’s how not to draw up a garden scheme:

Armed with a handful of sticks and a ball of string we marked out the various areas in the garden. Here’s what we did:

We’re just waiting for the architects to send us the final house plans with precise measurements. Once we know what foundations are being dug where we can really get going on the garden. The builders are going to need a skip when they start clearing the house and demolishing lots of internal walls – but I’ve got that skip earmarked for all that extra soil we need to get rid of from the garden. Hope they won’t mind…